User Experience Design Blog

Jun 10, 2009 - Here are a few quotes that should provide some mid-week inspiration. Some are fairly familiar and other are new gems: “It’s the total experience that matters. And that starts from when you first hear about a product… experience is more based upon memory than reality. If your memory of the product is wonderful, you will excuse [...]

Jun 8, 2009 - Colleen Jones at UX Magazine published a poignant article today entitled, Using Content to Grow Customer Relationships. She speaks about the value of enhancing communication, sometimes in lieu of features, to nuture customer relationships. In so doing, companies can create richer experiences by improving the business-human connection. She advocates for focusing on messaging not only [...]

May 28, 2009 - Extending the conversation around its “blood, sweat and tears” process, Nokia’s design team tells the story of the making of its upcoming N97 homescreen. Discovering at the outset that, “of the total time you spend using your mobile phone, on average 85 per cent of that time is spent on your homescreen,” the team went [...]

May 9, 2009 - Touch continues to be a big topic in user experience and product development. I recently came across two articles that add great points to the continuing dialog: Design Considerations for Touch UI This article enumerates five major pointers for designing effective touch interfaces, namely: Design for immediate access Keep gestures smart and simple Leverage clear mental models Design for real hand [...]

Apr 8, 2009 - I encourage everyone in product development and service industries to watch the talk which Don Norman gave at UX Week last year (video below). I finally had a chance to watch the video that was released earlier this year, and heard many gems. It’s great to hear the father of User Experience design advocate for [...]

Apr 2, 2009 - Without user experience design to ground and inform it, trying to make sense of web analytics results in conjecture. On the other hand, user experience design without analytical testing to validate and fine-tune it can only be informed guesswork. Analytics data is useful when it is utilized to measure success of goals and to understand performance [...]

Mar 27, 2009 - Dave Zuverink, a Senior User Research Specialist on Adobe XD’s Mobile and Devices team, wrote a compelling article on the five dimensions of successful mobile application experiences. He lists: Core: the fundamentals which support the principle “form follows function” Social: taking advantage of the platform’s intrinsic communication focus Contextual: being aware of physical location (also, based on comments [...]

Mar 26, 2009 - Douglas Bowman, largely credited with building the visual design team at Google, left the company on Friday, March 20. On his last day he wrote his reasons for leaving on his blog, Stopdesign. In the post he states his frustration with data dictating design and leaving barely any room for creativity. Bowman writes: Yes, it’s true [...]

Mar 23, 2009 - BuisinessWeek has a great Q&A with Google’s Director of User Experience, Irene Au. In the article, Irene Au is asked about Google’s approach to design and brand coherence across different Google products. Not surprisingly, Google has a very scientific approach to experience design, heavily rooted in quantitative methods: [Engineers] and analysts pore over streams of data [...]

Mar 20, 2009 - Imagine you go to a store to buy some new jeans. As you are checking out, the cashier tells you that you must provide your name, email, and passcode to purchase the items you’ve selected. You’d probably exclaim some choice words and storm out of the store, vowing never to return. Well, many websites continue [...]